Posts Tagged ‘war’

Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mullen, was featured in an interview two weeks ago that expresses the great need for healing efforts for wounded combat veterans and their families.

Admiral Mullen shared from his heart about the depth of this problem and its effect on families and the shocking suicide rates that are coming about as a side effect of our nation being in a state of continual war.

“If I’m a 5-year-old boy or girl in the family of one of these deploying units for the army whose average deployment was 12 months at a time, and my dad or mom – but mostly my dad – has deployed at this pace, I’m now fifteen or sixteen years old, and my dad has been gone three, four or five times. And my whole conscious life, from the time when I was five and I started to figure out that there was something out there, my whole conscious life has been at war. The United States has never, never experienced that before. And we see incredible stresses on families.

Now we are coming home. By no means are we home. We still have 90,000 troops in Afghanistan. And I believe we’re going to see a couple decades of challenges associated with the stresses we’ve not been dealing with and the issues we’ve been packing away. Indicative of that is the incredible suicide rate we have on the active side, which is even despite all the efforts of leadership to contain it, is in the army this year higher now than it was a year ago. And another statistic that hasn’t gotten much traction is that we’ve got 18 vets a day who are killing themselves in the United States.”

This is why we are doing what we do here at Wounded Warriors – Sons & Daughters of America.